While the heat is not ideal for GETTING WORK DONE-- which is of course what we're on earth for, to GET DONE as efficiently as possible all the important TASKS on our TO-DO LISTS-- I can drizzle cumulative gallons of sweat into my ancient external keyboard with no external ill effect. By contrast, my un-air-conditioned friends who work in paint or ink on paper struggle badly, losing hours of labor to blots.

The major summer-related challenge to my writing has been getting the sleep I need. Because the heat persists around the clock, I must have the window open. The open window admits mosquitoes, but one adjusts to that. What I cannot sleep through is "progress." Disgusting as it is to say, much of New Orleans is a construction zone, and the crews start promptly at eight a.m. If you are a long-time third-shift type whose writing space only begins cooling below "hellish' around ten p.m., sleep becomes scarce.

On the bright side, sleep deprivation exacerbates or perhaps enhances my natural New Orleans summer-self: listless, lethargic, dreamy, too enervated to think clearly or take much action. It's not an unpleasant way to be, as long as you aren't afflicted with the disease Americans call ambition. I consider summer the time of year when the world around me finally slows to my preferred pace. Many (though never enough) of the grasping, hyperproductive assholes flee to cooler climates, and no-one who remains expects much from anyone. One week blends into the next, sludgy chunks of interchangeable dream-day passed in a scalding bath, a hazy crazy simmer, a months-long feverish fugue state. Exhaustion notwithstanding, I fucking love the summer.

In more news about things other people have written, I had the honor in June of being asked to hold a public conversation with Brian Boyles, author of New Orleans Boom and Blackout, this year's One Book New Orleans selection. Boyles' book is a superb primer on late 20th- & early 21st-century New Orleans political history, identifying & tracing historical origins of the currents swirling though contemporary New Orleans; I recommend it to anyone interested in how the civic sausage gets made.